This post discusses what it means to own a project, product, service, system, process, etc. Ownership is a role taken on by everyone from time to time.

Ownership is stewardship. It’s taking responsibility to achieve quality outcomes in a particular scope and timescale on behalf of the entire team through attention, craft, and care.

It takes attention and craft to turn a good idea into a great product. Grant yourself permission to create something great.

Table of contents

Skills required

• Ability to leverage your own agency to get things done.
• Ability to balance short term and long term goals to achieve high impact, sustained over an extended period of time.
• Ability to gracefully field change requests, being open to ideas, improving ideas. Be responsive and knowledgeable about business needs.
• Ability to shepherd larger initiatives: helping others to think through the implications of a change, break down the work, establish success criteria, and review contributions with an eye toward robustness and simplicity.
• Ability to drive timely consensus among stakeholders, effectively communicate the plan, and execute the plan to achieve great outcomes. Includes doing pre-work to understand ahead of time where consensus will be required and front-loading it to early phases.
• Ability to earn trust and de facto authority through clear, concise, accurate communication on technical topics and prolific design and code contributions. You set the bar for quality and speed.
• Ability to admit mistakes. They’re inevitable! Backtrack as needed. Know when to ask for backup when you’re underwater.

Responsibilities of an Owner

Correctness

Achieve clarity of purpose early. Establish and communicate end goals in a concise, compelling way. Avoid or compartmentalize incidental complexity. Clarify, categorize, or abstract irreducible complexity. Establish clear test/review methodology focused on verifying high level outcomes.

Quality

• Ship good things.
• Unix philosophy: single-purpose, composable layers.
• Create good abstractions that make simple things easy.
• Ensure that we don’t build leaky abstractions. If degradation is required, provide a documented escape hatch that is consistent with global behavior and concepts.

Communication

• Core concepts up front: what is it, why do we have it, how does it work, what else does it interact with or depend on.
• Openness to contributions, and change management. Gracefully field change requests, treat collaborators with respect.
• Consistently and clearly communicate status, progress, and tracking to target dates through established channels. Surface blockers early.
• Collaborate to solve problems creatively
• Accelerate solution exploration through clear explanations.
• Help others to explain and frame change requests in light of long-term plans.
• Know when it makes sense to change the plan.
• Apply standards in service of clarity, correctness, simplicity, and consistency (in that order.)

Timeliness

• Keep initiatives on the rails. Unblock and re-route quickly and effectively.
• Don’t stop until things are all-the-way done! It’s often easy to leave things at 90%. Cut scope, but don’t leave things half-finished. There’s a big difference!